I don’t write here an awful lot, not because I don’t have a lot to say. As many folks can attest, including the listeners of 102.5 The Game’s Pharmaceutical Soccer, I almost always have something to say. This website has been a much larger undertaking than initially conceived, and in between Nashville Soccer Club, Nashville Rhythm FC, and of course, my day-to-day job and union duties, I’ve mostly focused on the research aspects of this more than the story-telling side of things. And the end result of all of this is that I get asked that title question an awful lot.

There is a common misperception about this country and soccer. Essentially, people act like it’s this new sport that really only gained traction in the last 15-20 years. It’s not entirely untrue, as everyone knows that the popularity took ages to actually get going, but it misses a broader point, which is that the United States has been playing this game as long as most countries on this planet. We cannot always depend on teams and leagues that don’t have the history to tell the stories of those that came before them. Looking at it more locally, Nashville’s own local MLS club barely acknowledges its own history before MLS took off. There’s a marketing aspect to this, of course, but it misses the fact that 2021 marks 40 years since the formation of Nashville’s actual first professional soccer club, the Nashville Diamonds, a team that played in a league that itself lasted more than half a century.

I had never actually heard of this Nashville team until a few years ago. Their existence was largely absent from the web, and they were mostly unremarkable, losing 21 of the 28 matches they played. But as I slowly dug my way through the newspaper reels in the library, I discovered that some of the very same themes we’ve seen around failing and/or barely surviving clubs the last few years were also present here in the Music City in 1982. And while it took several years for some of those remaining Diamonds players to reunite with the upstart Nashville Metros, I realized that someone should probably try to tell a more thorough soccer story in Nashville. Once I began to realize that no one seemed to want to take up that mission, I launched this effort.

This is a long and complicated project, and I tend to only work on it here-and-there as time permits, but the important part to me is that you have shown enough interest to come here and learn more. Thank you for that.